Tea Party Part3 - 1200+ Cricut Cuts

In continuing with my Supercalifragilistic Proper English Tea Party series (that's a mouthful) I gotta give up kudos to my Cricut Expression!  Omigoodness--what a life saver when it came to party favors and such!  I've used my Cricut for things here and there, such as showing my son how to use it for his school poster projects, and for a variety of projects & cards -- but to use it to this extent was a first even for me. 

[If you're just joining in on the Tea Party series, you can catch up by clicking on the links for Tea Party Part1 - The Theme, and Tea Party Part2 - The Menu.] 

I mentioned in an earlier post about making a satchel type purse for all of our guests -- we decided that these would look great at each place setting filled "Cloudless Sky Meringues".  These scrumptious vanilla meringue puffs were made with a very high quality vanilla which left the meringues white instead of light brown, and they became our "take home treats" for each of the ladies (both young & old) in attendance.  You might remember, the colors we picked for the tea party were yellow, lime green, & white/black.  So when I was looking for a sturdy cardstock to make these satchels I hit the jackpot when I found DCWV Lemon Paper Stack!  All the colors worked perfectly for our theme--and JoAnn Fabrics was having a sale too!  Regularly they were $19.99, and at 50% off I got three stacks for less than $30!  We were anticipating up to 150 guests so this was a great money saver!

I made the satchels with the Forever Young cartridge (flower9 purse), using the Fit-to-Page feature for my 12x12 mats, and because I was making so many (I think I ended up making around 125) I also used my 12x24 mats. For the longer mats, instead of using Fit-to-Page, I set my dial to 6 1/4", which is what the Fit-to-Page feature calculated the purse size to be. I will tell you though, that if I tried to cut the purses at 6 1/4" on the 12x12 mats it wouldn't let me-saying it was too large a cut. So I think the size varied about 1/8" or so. But you couldn't tell the difference by looking at the completed satchels. I cut a daisy for each satchel from the Picturesque cart out of white Colorbok textured cardstock, and though I could've cut the centers of the daisy out with the same cart, one of the gals (Debbie) at church offered to cut them out of yellow felt--which added a nice texture to the daisy. I have yet to try cutting felt with my Cricut--but I've heard it can be done. Instead of using the pre-cut lines to tuck in the purse satchel flap, we used a small bit of velcro to fasten the latch--that way we could control how large the opening of the purse was. This helped when filling the satchels with meringues!  There was still an unused space on the cardstock that didn't get cut, so I used my paper trimmer and cut the additional off which were perfectly sized mats for the standard A2 size card!  Now that's more bang for your buck!  =) 

Luckily I didn't have to assemble them myself.  All our team members, and a few of their teenagers, got together for a craft night at church...specifically for putting these purses together.  I had most of the cutting already done, but I brought my Cricut for some extra additions.  We had a good time together--I even brought my camera.  Unfortunately, I didn't take even one picture.  =(

We also decided to make our own "sillouette" confetti for the tables, using black cardstock and three different designs: a woman's profile w/hat, an umbrella, and a tea set. The umbrella came from the Forever Young cart, and the woman's profile (Slhoet10 in shadow) & TeaSet came from the Heritage cart. I cut about 300 each -- so we had a lot of confetti!

Finally, to number each of the tables I cut larger daisies, this time cutting yellow cardstock for the centers. I used the Nifty Fifties cart for the numbers 1-20, cut out of black cardstock. Originally we had planned to tack these to the Menus using removeable glue dots, but the menus weren't sturdy enough. So we decided to use the same glue dots to attach the daisy table numbers to the the stands holding the menus, and it turned out very well.

For the Beverage Table I cut three placecards from the Thanksgiving cart.  I used textured light green cardstock for the base & black for the frame.  I printed the beverage names on vellum with my computer and layered it between the frame & placecard.  This was the only cartridge I had that has placecards on it.  I'm wondering if there are others? hmmm

Okay, so if you've been following the math on this you may have come up with the number of cuts my Cricut made, which is about 1227 cuts! When I first got my Cricut in December 2009, I used it for card making on occassion, and a small variety of projects...including when my son used it for his poster projects. I've only cut chipboard with it a few times, so the majority of cuts has been on cardstock. I'm telling you this to say that I have not changed my blade once during that time! Yep--even with the 1200+ cuts I just made. But I will also tell you that I will be changing it soon. =) I started with my blade set to 4 and my pressure to 4. I've only recently (after the tea party) changed my blade up to the max at 6, and my pressure to max. So I'll get a few more cuts out of it yet before changing the blade. Not too shabby considering the blades are $14.95 each (approximately) -- I'd venture to stay that is getting your money's worth! ha ha...

Now, if any of you watched the debut of the Cricut Expression2 on HSN you might have heard me as a call-in talking to Jinger about the 1200+ cuts I had recently made with my current Cricut Expression for our tea party! Both she and the host were certainly surprised -- and yes, I did nearly all those cuts in one weekend. And I would certainly not advise anyone to do that--that's just crazy!

For those of you that do not own a Cricut, and have read down this far, check back with me in another day or so for Part4 of my 5 part Tea Party series: The Decorations.  I'll have a tutorial that does not include the use of the Cricut.  =)

Thanks for hanging out with me...Lisa